What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

HOLLAND COTTER

Eliza Douglas and Anne Imhof

Through Oct. 21. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan; 212-328-7885, galeriebuchholz.de.

Photo

The German artist Anne Imhof created the most-talked-about artwork of this year’s Venice Biennale: “Faust,” an elaborate installation-performance piece that kitted out the German Pavilion with caged Doberman pinschers, a troupe of youthful, runway-ready performers and a raised glass-and-steel floor that placed viewers above the action. It won the top prize, the Golden Lion, and from afar seemed to capitalize on mixed signals concerning corporate architecture, voyeurism, gender fluidity, feminist autonomy and Germany’s Nazi past. Artforum magazine called it “a work of supremely entitled cool.”

One of the star performers in “Faust” was the German artist Eliza Douglas, who is Ms. Imhof’s partner and her frequent painting collaborator, as evidenced by their joint New York gallery debut at Galerie Buchholz. Crowded with paintings they have made together and separately, their show communicates a smart, ambiguous, mostly unsatisfying polish at closer range.

There’s nothing new here, although everything is extremely well done. Ms. Imhof’s main efforts are shiny acrylic monochromes (black, white or turquoise) on aluminum with impulsive flurries of scratches — variants of zombie formalism that imply vandalism. “Baby, Baby” is also hers: a standard gestural abstraction centered on an octopus with an open mouth and a touch of Francis Bacon teeth. In the pair’s collaborative canvases, their signatures form large, semi-legible tangles — variously fragmented, magnified and reversed, in snappy black on white. Consistent with their comment on the authorial aura, the works are made by assistants, and they veer close to the black-and-white irreverence of ones by Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen, although those painters may also be intended targets.

In addition, Ms. Douglas exhibits solitary efforts: suitably modish, performative canvases in which hyper-realistic hands and feet are connected by improvised, abstract lines. The loose brushwork and the octopus return in a two-panel collaboration that is obviously titled “A Hundred Thousand Dollars.” The artists’ signatures recur in works featuring Warholesque arrangements of images of Ms. Douglas. Doubts about these pieces can elicit another one: But maybe that’s the point? For the time being, and especially when they’re all ganged together as they are here, that may be enough.

ROBERTA SMITH

Sally Saul

Through Oct. 29. Rachel Uffner Gallery, 170 Suffolk Street, Manhattan; 212-274-0064, racheluffnergallery.com.

Photo

The unglazed ceramic humans, animals, shoes and underpants that compose Sally Saul’s long overdue New York solo debut seem gleefully macabre. In one tableau, two naked cave women and an anthropomorphically officious vulture hunch over the edge of their pedestal as if contemplating the inevitability of death as exemplified by some unseen carcass. In another, cartoonish tarantulas and a blissed-out frog join a few more vultures to flex their muscles like a high school wrestling team.

Photo

A pair of elegant black pumps with rosy interiors and deliberately bumpy surfaces are a flinty joke about gender roles, sex and mortality. A small bedroom without walls brings to mind an archaeological site like the ancient Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük, suggesting that domestic relationships haven’t changed all that much since the introduction of agriculture. A paint-smeared Adam and Eve titled “He” and “She”; a sensitive portrait bust of Ms. Saul’s husband, the painter Peter Saul, with tender blue eyes and a stand of asparaguslike brushes jammed into his crown; and several other ceramic people all seem intended to highlight every squalid embarrassment of the flesh.

Photo

But by foregrounding these embarrassments, Ms. Saul creates a kind of afterimage of spiritual serenity. Formally, too, the works employ a similar feint and jab. “He” and “She” lead with their gremlinlike scale and shovel feet, which lets their striking precision of detail and anatomy — the subtly buoyant curve of her belly, the slightly flatter angle of his, the carefully varied textures of their rough-looking hair — follow more quietly.

WILL HEINRICH

‘Ruptura’

Through Nov. 6. Luciana Brito NY Project, 186 Franklin Street, Manhattan; 917-528-1606, lucianabritogaleria.com.br.

Photo

After Galeria Nara Roesler and Mendes Wood DM, Luciana Brito Galeria is the third major gallery from São Paulo to open a New York outpost. In Brazil, Ms. Brito presents exhibitions in a breathtaking modernist bungalow with a garden designed by Roberto Burle Marx. Her digs in TriBeCa have a more unexpected architectural detail: walk-in freezers from the space’s previous duty as a restaurant.

The first show here introduces eight artists of Grupo Ruptura, an influential 1950s movement in São Paulo of geometric abstraction that was more rigorous and utopian, if slightly less fun, than its counterpart in Rio de Janeiro, Grupo Frente. As their hometown metastasized and Brasília started to rise, São Paulo artists such as Geraldo de Barros and Luiz Sacilotto painted totally abstract compositions — spiraling curlicues in the former’s case, cascading black-and-white stripes in the latter’s — that aimed to give form to the utopian dreams of a new Brazil. Judith Lauand, the group’s only female member (still working at age 95), composed geometric outlines on circular supports that seem to take on three dimensions. A solid half of the artists in Grupo Ruptura were European immigrants, including the Austrian-born Lothar Charoux, who made whispering compositions of orthogonal and diagonal lines, and Waldemar Cordeiro, from Rome, whose intriguing paintings of interconnected circles give a tiny hint of his future as an early computer artist.

Photo

The show makes a pleasant counterpoint to this summer’s Grupo Frente exhibition at Galerie Lelong, as well as the Hélio Oiticica retrospective that just closed at the Whitney. And some stylish Brazilian furniture, by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Tenreiro, offers a further jolt of megacity glamour for those of us who find New York a bit too small.

JASON FARAGO

Continue reading the main story